Filtering incoming spam, while not 100% correct, is a pretty straightforward thing to do. Use DNSBL and other lists from spamhaus and it takes care of 90+% of the problem. Incoming spam has not been a huge issue for me, but when people try to send mail to someone in M365 cloud or to Gsuite and they just decide that your server isn’t important enough they just block you out and that’s it. Trying to circumvent that takes a ton of time and effort and while it can be done it’s a huge pain in the rear. And trying to fight your way trough the 1st tier support to someone who actually understands the problem and attempts to fix that while you customers are complaining that “problem with email” is actually affecting on their income is the part I’ll happily leave behind.

I’ll set up a couple of new VPS servers to host my personal and friends emails, but if they complain that the service I’m paying from my personal pocket isn’t what they’re after then they’re free to switch into whatever they like. And as infrastructure for that is something like 100€/year I’ll happily pay it by myself so that no one has an option to say ‘I paid for this so you need to fix it’ anymore. On commercial case that’s obviously not an option and I’ve had my share of running a business in a very hostile environment.

Also if you’re running an email server for others, it takes very little from single individual, like a small webshop newsletter, which enough people manually marks as junk and you’re on a block list again. Latest one with microsoft took several days to clear, even if all of their tools and 1st tier support claimed that my IP isn’t on a black list.

I’ve jumped all the hoops and done everything by the book, but that still doesn’t mean that any of the big players won’t just screw you up because some of their automaton happens to decide so. That’s why I’m shutting my small ISP business down, there’s no more money to make on that and a ton of customers have moved to the cloud anyways, mostly to microsoft due to their office-suite pricing. It was kind of fun while it lasted, but that ship has sailed.

Amount of lithium in a single drone battery is minuscle. Quickly googled answer says that there’s about 7% from weight lithium in a battery, so your average drone cell might have something like 10-20 grams of lithium in it (altough that 7% is for Li-Ion and drones tend to use LiFePo, so that number might be wrong). In a single electric car there’s tens of kilograms of lithium inside. So a single car fire anywhere in the world “wastes” more lithium than hundreds and hundreds of drones in Ukraine.

Sure, it would be nice to recover that small amount too, but in practise we need a better material than lithium for our batteries. Also there’s things like single-use vape-pens which use perfectly fine li-ion cell but it was manufactured without any means to charge it, a handful of those discarded on a nearest trash can (or more likely to the street next to it) is comparable to a single drone battery and people throw those away without concern every day.

It’s and SMD led on a main board of the drone (at least on DJI ones) and the whole board is quite a complex computer with a ton of RF tech, power limitations and whatever is included to make those things both safe and fun for your average consumer. For a skilled operator it’s not a problem to pull out the led and wire it to a transistor, but you need to pull the whole drone apart, somewhat sophisticated tools to solder wires to the led contact points, reassemble the whole thing excactly as it were and then connect that to the external harness.

Or, you can just bend the frame out of chicken wire, twist wires together and secure them with a tape or hot glue, zip-tie that to a drone and you’re good to go. I think in Ukraine they use a ton of 3d-printed stuff which makes it more reliable and even easier to assemble. That way you don’t risk breaking the drone and you can prefab pretty much the whole thing and just send them out to the field where practically anyone can assemble it even on standing in a mud puddle and have successful results within minutes from pulling a new drone out of a box.

While you are of course correct on this, the amount of waste and environmental damage Russia is causing by blowing up dams and pretty much leaving a trail of garbage where ever they go combined with the pollution and wasted resources on burning fuel (both in engines and otherwise), destroying buildings and everything else going on, the couple truckloads of small LiFePo batteries on drones aren’t even a rounding error in the equation.

I’m not an expert on what residual materials come from burning batteries, but I’m willing to bet that plastic from pretty much everything on the field has a bigger environmental affect, even the drones themselves are mostly just a plastic shell with very little of anything else in them.

It’s not even electrical output. They mount harness to the drone carrying payload with a 9V battery (or whatever) with a light sensitive resistor positioned over the auxiliary light. When the light turns on the payload is released with a motor/solenoid/something running from that battery on the harness and it doesn’t require any modification to the drone itself.

I am well aware of the situation and Russia is breaking laws of the war pretty much as fast as they can, by the means (among others) mentioned on the article. But without context this particular message plays directly to Russians and when message like that is spread around someone might take the bait and actually reveal positions of the Ukrainian military, but Russia has proven over and over again that they just don’t care about civil casualties (or human life in general). If anyone there actually provides locations for fighters to the attacker the Russia would most likely attack them first and after that destroy the city and all the informants in it, like we’ve seen many times over last few years.

And that’s what I’m referring to when calling for responsibility on spreading messages like this. Some poor soul might believe the message in fear/hope for the better/something else and that would really only make things even worse for them, as the cities are already being destroyed by the attacker and any intel to them is only going to weaken the force trying to stop them.

By all means, spread the information and reveal the lies Russians are offering, but do that with care and include the context with everything. Revealing information about Ukraine troops is not going to stop Russian drones from attacking childrens and their mothers on the playing field.

Someone more or less anonymous over the internet is saying that. I have no doubt that Russia would level entire city blocks if they have even a suspicion that there’s Ukrainian fighters in the block (or just in case regardless of the intel), but in here we have a single telegram message and nothing else. It might be someone in command on the Russian side, maybe trying to get most out of their ammunition, or it might be something bigger, with the information provided we don’t really know. And that’s something to keep in mind when relaying these kind of messages. We, who are sitting in our chairs in warm glow of the monitor and a beer in reach, should have at least some responsibility on what information we spread and in what context.

But with the track record from Russia, I wouldn’t be surprised if they shoot to anything given to them, so if people in that area happen to know that area between this street and that street is completely empty, it might be worth a try to get them to shoot at nothing and reveal their positions while doing it. Just take into account that their accuracy isn’t really the best there is for multiple of reasons.

The actual number will be much higher.

Ukraine reports almost 9000 tanks destroyed. Some time ago I made a rough calculation on what wikipedia lists on Russian military hardware and based on that they had around 14 000 tanks before the war started. I don’t think that even Russians themselves know how many of those are in any kind of usable and/or repairable state and which are just scrap metal laying on some field in the middle of nowehere stripped of anything useful.

Additionally, Ukraine reported destroyed tanks in single digits per day for quite a while, but for last few days the numbers have gone up, I’d guess because of counter attacks in Kursk and/or because Ukraine is finally receiving some ammunition for their hardware. Whatever the case might be, majority of Russian tanks are destroyed anyways and I’d guess that what’s left is soviet relics and a significant portion of those are just scrap metal (which is of course a useful resource) instead of anything even close to combat ready.

And, just to clarify for those who didn’t click the link, that’s gap in usage. So Russia still shoots twice as many shells than Ukraine, but it’s getting closer. Article doesn’t mention if that’s because Ukraine has more shells available or if Russia shoots less, I’d guess it’s because of both.

losing 1380 personnel, but only 1 tank

That’s what I’ve been following too. And additionally, based on quick’n’rough estimation from wikipedia numbers, artillery reserves are pretty much depleted too, so Russia is fighting on what ever soviet era relics they can refurbish and what they can manufacture/buy. I don’t think they’ll have short of ammunition any time soon, but diminishing numbers of barrels should start to show up on these statistics ‘in the near future’, whenever that might be.

Did they damage that target? Disable it? Destroy it?

I haven’t seen any public statistics for this, but based on my understanding, if you hit pretty much any modern tank on top hatch or some other weak spot with a javelin it’ll at least disable the tank as it pretty much melts everything inside the crew space/engine bay. Those might be repairable, but most likely not in the location.

And what Ukrainians will most likely encounter is not a modern tank, but a T-62 or some even older soviet relic, which doesn’t have active armor and those can be stopped with a good throw of molotov cocktail. So, my somewhat uneducated guess would be that every decent hit is a destroyed tank. Of course there’s missed shots, less than optimal impacts and all that, so actual number isn’t 100%, but I’d guess that it’s not far off.

And for tanks there’s also a guestion if Ukraine can even find anything to shoot at. On Ukrainian reports destroyed tanks have been in single digits per day for quite a while, so either Russia has learned on how to defend their gear or (in my opinion more likely) they just don’t have that many tanks anymore. Obviously across the whole Russia there’s a ton of relics around, starting from T-34’s from WW1, but I guess no one knows how many of those are in condition where they could even move on their own and even if they did it’s guestionable how effective those would be on todays battle field.

But javelins are still pretty neat hardware and they can easily destroy pretty much anything on the field, the only guestion is if Ukraine can get those close enough to hit anything interesting.

Unfortunately they didn’t get all of them. Russia has sent a ton of drones and missiles at the last few days, offically targeting energy infrastructure, including a dam near Kyiv.

While that might play a very small part on their strategy I don’t think anyone in Ukraine thinks twice before shooting it should the situation really need it. It would make a nice trophy, agreed, but I think the mentality is that if it doesn’t burn then nice and even if it does the charred remains are still a trophy and a big PR win via social media.

I don’t know how willing they are to give up Crimea and I suppose one of the reasons the war is happening now is that the west closed their eyes when Russia annexed areas from Ukraine. At least on the news Crimea is often described as ‘temporarily occupied’, so I think at least offically they’re targeting 1991 borders.

But yeah, it’s solely up to Ukraine, and I believe they’ll have very similar support regardless of the border, at least as long as they’re not claiming anything beyond 1991 borders from Russia.

I’m not exactly sure what happened between 1991 and 2013 around there, but I’d argue that they should have the original indepencence borders and that’s it. But it’s not my call by any stretch, Ukraine and their people are the ones who should settle where the border is.

And the global west should support their cause. Sure, it’s not particulary easy for anyone right now, but for the majority of the people in EU supporting Ukraine is financially mostly a inconvenience. You might pay a slightly bit more on your bread and butter, but currently no one is coming for you with guns, which is very much a reality in Ukraine right now.

I’ve seen my share of fire around metal and the amount of steel on those things the fire shown on the picture doesn’t do much. Of course all the plastic on hoses/wiring, seat covers and things like that, the crew obviously included, wouldn’t be fine. You obviously couldn’t just hop in and drive the thing off from that point and if your task was just to disable the tank and trust that you have the area under control so that it couldn’t be recovered for repairs any time soon, sure, the first drone would have been well enough.

I don’t really know either, but based on the videos from the lines it seems like Ukraine gladly spend few cheap drones to make absolutely sure that the things they stop won’t move again. Additionally, some models, even if their crew is dead and the engine is dead, can still autonomously respond to incoming fire (assuming of course that there’s still juice in the batteries and the weapons systems work), so that alone for me is enough to spend another drone to confirm that the thing is dead and stays that way.

It’s hard to tell. First one likely detonated on impact to the drone cage/camouflage and shaped charge possibly breached the roof from the turret and/or engine bay depending on where it actually hit. But I don’t think the “tank” part of that took too much damage. That might have been running with somewhat minor repairs and maybe an engine swap.

The second hit was between the turret and the frame next to main barrel which absoutely rendered that thing as scrap. I’d say that a single drone is pretty cheap price to verify that this particular unit isn’t coming after you ever again. Specially since Russia has very limited capabilities to produce new ones.

Guy reporting to Putin and Ukrainian chiefs have quite opposite interests to give estimations and I don’t know how accurately you can draw lines on the maps, so I’d guess that the russian guy underestimates the area by a lot in a hope that his window doesn’t suddenly break with his body and Ukraine likes to give a round number, even if reality is 830km² or whatever (I don’t believe that they’d publicly lie about the area to be 3 times bigger than actual, but 20% on those cirumstances is pretty much just a rounding error).